‘There just weren’t women playing’ – Kelsie Whitmore, baseball trailblazer

Kelsie Whitmore is one of three figures on the baseball diamond at the Staten Island Community Park. The stands of the ballpark are empty, give or take a few hotdog sellers opening their kiosks in the concourses. Her coach, Nelson Figueroa, is hitting balls at her, which she waits on before reading the angle it will arrive, motioning towards the ball, then receiving it in her mitt with her left hand and throwing back with her right.

Next to her, a girl is watching and then doing the same. She is much smaller than Whitmore. Her throws do not comfortingly thud back into Figueroa’s mitt like Whitmore’s do, but die halfway before bouncing back along the ground. She looks towards Whitmore after each, who nods, shadows the action and then turns to receive.

Whitmore wears the No 3 shirt for Staten Island FerryHawks. In April, she signed to play professionally with the team, alongside 24 men. She is the first woman since 1994 to play in a league that is affiliated with Major League Baseball. The Atlantic League, which Staten Island play in, is the highest form of baseball outside the MLB. It is often referenced as “the second chance league”, where players of Major League calibre are trying to get back in while playing the closest possible standard. No woman has played at the same level.

“We see a lot more girls coming out to the games these days,” says the team’s general manager, Gary Perone, as he watches from the “best office in the world” on the second tier, overlooking Richmond Park. “Even for the Little League teams. They all want to come out and speak to her. She’s inspiring a lot of people. Not just here, but across all the five boroughs of New York City.”

The fan today, he says, has been granted some time with her idol